


Now I'm convinced that I'm goin' under

by Meatball42



Series: Rare Pairs [35]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Everyone Thinks They're Together, F/M, FemmeRemix 2016, Friends to Lovers, Maria Hill Feels, POV Female Character, Partner Betrayal, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-HYDRA Reveal, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-08-07
Packaged: 2018-07-25 20:55:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7547051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meatball42/pseuds/Meatball42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a reason they called it <i>falling</i> in love, and it wasn't because you could learn to do it without getting hurt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Now I'm convinced that I'm goin' under

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theladyscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theladyscribe/gifts).
  * Inspired by [They Think We're Lovers (Kept Under Covers)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3543290) by [theladyscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theladyscribe/pseuds/theladyscribe). 



> Like the original work, my title is from Bonnie Raitt's "Let's Give Them Something To Talk About."

The fall of SHIELD was a humanitarian disaster for Washington D.C., and the event of slaughter for any agents of SHIELD who remained loyal, but it was also calamitous for anyone associated with SHIELD, regardless of how physically close they were to Hydra on that day. Maria Hill’s first act once the Helicarriers were confirmed neutralized was to travel to a secure, highly-classified base with a large computer system. She spent the next week combing through what Romanoff had released, doing her job for the last time.

Maria squeezed SHIELD’s sister agencies abroad with what little credentials she still had to her name, begging for teams to extract her agents abroad whose covers had been blown. It got harder every hour, every day. She turned to her personal contacts, favors owed to her around the world. She turned to Nick’s contacts, Phil’s, anyone’s who she knew and could leverage. The worst moments were when hours of work were discovered wasted on an agent who was Hydra, or when extraction teams burst in to find Maria’s loyal SHIELD agents already dead; killed either by their own, traitorous teammates, or by the organizations they’d been infiltrating when the leak displayed their true identities to the world.

There was more: trying to reassure valuable contacts who no longer trusted her; contacting civilians who’d been involved in SHIELD missions and warning them to watch their backs, or giving them advice to move and change their identities. Guilt that she could no longer do it for them, just send an order down to the labs and have it cleaned up, spick and span.

A lot of SHIELD’s various science departments had been Hydra, as it turned out.

Some of her associates at other agencies-- those who knew Maria well enough to trust her-- offered their assistance, but were bogged down by their own responsibilities and SHIELD’s plummeting respectability.  She did what she could to shore up her own reputation, and to protect a few key players. She passed on intel that her contacts could use, regardless of how secret it was supposed to be. ‘Classified’ was just another word by that point: the depth and breadth of the leak was becoming known, and the good guys might as well get the info before hacker groups like Anonymous and the Rising Tide.

Admittedly, her judgement might have been a bit shaky by that point, considering how many days she’d gone without sleep. Finally, she collapsed on a cot, waking up to a cramping stomach and a full bladder. But she’d done her job; there was no shame in it.

By the time she surfaced, Stark had left messages on her phone; he had an interview with Stark Industries as- an administrative assistant. Wonderful. Still, the salary quoted was nearly what she’d made with SHIELD. Maria tried not to look that horse in its ironic, private-sector mouth.

There were also demands that she appear for preliminary hearings regarding SHIELD. Maria took one look at those and went back to bed.

She dreamed that she was in her own bed, at her home that was probably swarming with CIA agents. Jefferson was behind her, his warm body curled around hers. She reached back to pull him closer, sinking her fingers into his gently curling hair, and he laughed. He leaned in close, and whispered in her ear, “Hail Hydra!”

After that Maria carefully slept six hours or less every night.

~ ~ * ~ ~

As it turned out, Maria wasn’t that great as an administrative assistant. It was strange, considering she’d never found a computer system or a weapon or a language she couldn’t master, but luckily, she only had to do it for a few weeks, while Legal got the Avengers Initiative up and running as an entity unique from SHIELD. In the meantime, Maria mostly focused on assimilating cleared former SHIELD agents into the hierarchy at Stark Industries. One of Pepper Potts’ assistants, a cheerfully competent young woman named Violeta Oberreuter- “Call me Vee, it’s easier for you, I’ve found”- swooped in and took over the rest of her work, giving Maria ample time to prepare for her interrogations by Congress, support the burgeoning Avengers Initiative, and sleep.

Obviously an issue.

She started paying more attention to her wardrobe, which kept her busy for the few weeks before she transitioned to full-time for the Avengers. Finally back in the saddle, Maria was free to devote all of her time to tracking Hydra within and without SHIELD’s former sister agencies, helping out Phil when she could, and avoiding thinking about what her life had been like before the fall.

~ ~ * ~ ~

Vee was the one who forced her out of her new office on the third-to-top floor of the Tower at least once a week to come out for drinks with the other admins. They were a rowdy bunch, full of gossip and complaints, and smart enough for Maria to laugh out loud whenever arguments sprang up, which was fairly often. At work, those ladies (and Armand) were cool-headed, with steady hands, and tongues that could turn from genial to cutting in a heartbeat. Outside of work, they were humans like anyone else, and good ones.

Maria started cutting back on those outings. It was too hard to remember thinking the same things about her fellow agents, and when she caught herself suspecting that Amelia’s cheating boyfriend was a cover for something, she gave up altogether.

The next time Vee came to pick her up, Maria was adamant. “I have too much work to finish. Maybe next time,” she said, in a tone that calmly indicated next week would not be happening either.

Vee looked sad. “You do not want to ‘chill out’ with us?”

Maria softened. “I’m not in the mood for a crowd. I hope you all have a good time.”

Hesitantly, Vee stepped inside the threshold of Maria’s office. “Maybe… you will come out without a crowd? Just the two of us?”

Maria went cold all over. She heard Jefferson's voice in her ear, whispering behind her. _“Come on Hill, you’re gonna shrivel up and die in this office. Live a little! It’s only me!”_

“No, I don’t think I will.”

Vee spun around and left, hurt written all over her face, but Maria couldn’t even feel sorry.

Less than an hour later, Captain Rogers showed up in her office. Maria barely managed to school her expression, but it got easier once she smelled what he'd brought.

A working dinner, just what she needed.

~ ~ * ~ ~

Maria went back to work and didn’t lift her head until Rogers got back to town a few months later. Sure, she’d furnished her new apartment in that time, gone on a ‘vacation’ to New Zealand, but by the time she got a mass-text from Rogers about a Kurosawa retrospective, it _felt_ like the first time she’d breathed freely in a long time.

No one else besides Rogers showed up for the screenings, which was simply an affront. _Throne of Blood_ was one of the best adaptive works of all time, and certainly the least yawn-worthy Shakespeare adaptation. Once the show was over, Maria released her inner geek over an amused but appreciative Rogers. The gyros they picked up on a stroll around Astoria tasted better than anything had in a while.

Going back to her apartment, which she still couldn’t manage to call ‘home’ yet, felt hollow.

~ ~ * ~ ~

As new developments arose with Hydra, the US government, the Inhumans colony, and the recovery of the Winter Soldier, Maria’s workload started piling up once again. Although he’d caused a fair share of her work, spending time with Rogers was as close to 'slowing down' as Maria got. Helping him deal with online documentation that any Level 4 Agent could have handled back in the day was her coffee break, and reading him in on the increasingly complex work of tracking their various enemies around the globe won her fresh perspective and some valuable insight. And afterwards, he often insisted on taking her out for a meal, or he brought up some new exhibit or show that she just couldn’t resist. Maria found herself out of the office by five several nights a week.

Sometimes, when he was explaining what Hydra’s next move would be, or providing philosophic commentary on the state of American politics, it was easy to see Captain America, Phil’s man-crush idol. Maria listened to the sing-song twang in his voice and wondered if she would chip the paint if she scratched at his face. When he talked about Barnes, he was Captain Rogers, a leader taking care of his soldier, and with that man Maria could strongly relate.

But at the Guggenheim, or the small galleries in Brooklyn that displayed current artists, or at Yankee Stadium dressed in all Red Sox gear (prompting Maria’s first tactical extraction in a year), he was simply Steve Rogers, a hard-headed, sneaky, way-too-patriotic jackass who Maria found herself liking despite herself.

Back in the day, Agent Jefferson had snuck under her radar, starting out with breaks from work and sparring matches ‘to stay limber’ and moving on to quiet, no-pressure, we’re-all-busy dates, and from there into her bed and her apartment and her heart. As her relationship with Steve proceeded along a similar path, Maria’s radar went off (though perhaps not as early as it should have), and it was a struggle to keep her cool and remind herself that Steve was taken, and not a threat to her stability at all.

And then she heard that Barnes had asked Romanoff to his own celebratory gala, _not_ his presumptive life partner, and Maria took the night off and went home and had a controlled, private freak-out.

By the time Steve got around to asking her to the gala, Maria had accepted the fact that she was dating Steve Rogers; even if she hadn’t realized it, he clearly had, and it would be unfair to him to proceed along a different assumption. Even if the thought of being wooed into dating with take-out and evenings at quiet bistros _‘just a break from the office, relax’_ made her shiver inside the way a platoon of insurgents coming over a hill never could.

So Maria put on her calm face. They dressed up (and Steve was _gorgeous_ , how unfair was it that she'd apparently been dating him and hadn’t even gotten to sleep with him), and they went to the gala, and Maria carefully crafted her ‘it’s not you it’s me’ speech.

And when they were in the car, being driven back to Stark Tower, just as she was about to break out the clichés, Steve piped up with “Y’know, Bucky thought we were dating.”

It was so out of left field that she visibly displayed her surprise; not a good move for a spy. “Did he?” she asked, stalling.

"I told him we’re not," Steve tripped over his own tongue. "That we’re just—"

“Just what?” Maria stung inside in a whole new way, and it didn’t hurt less for being fresh, rather than a cheap remake.

"Just friends."

But they weren’t, were they? Maria had gone over their activities like a dossier, determining that the targets were, in fact, romantically entangled. She recalled scrutinizing Steve’s laugh and her reaction to it, the way he’d hold doors open for her with a private smile, the way she'd clear her schedule for him when she wouldn’t even give her employer the time of day unless it suited her.

Steve looked over at her, apprehensive in a way Maria had never seen on his face. "We are, right? Just friends?"

That was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it? No strings, no emotions, no chance that this could lead to her bed, to her damaged heart? Hadn’t she decided she was fine with living in her office forever?

Maria turned to stare out the window so Steve couldn’t see the fear in her eyes as she took his hand. "Why don't you come up for a cup of coffee when we get to my place,” she suggested.

It was the bravest thing she’d done in a long time.


End file.
